The fear: break it, shake it, make it...

Make it out, that is!

Because the Autumn energy is all about letting go of all of those things that are not useful to us anymore, and because the Equinox rituals have already started here in England even though the actual date will be on Monday, I will go full-on on what “the fear” is about today, partly to let it go myself, partly because I think that there are too many of us who have it nowadays, so however my words can carry me and others out to a safer zone and hopefully even help to get rid of “the fear”, I’ll just keep my policy of full honesty… there will be more on this by sometime November, cos I wrote a full entry on my return from Glastonbury but will release it after a particular episode of the Doctor Who Imaginarium Fan Production series that I am now fully working in, but posting that particular entry today would certainly mean Spoilers! and that’s a big no no for us all, Doctors, producers, all cast members and staff, and trust you me, even viewers ;)  I mean, there are pictures coming out already so people have seen a little bit of what’s it all about, right?  The awesome pictures of Stephen Cole as the Doctor and that with all of us with Dalek Om and the Tor right behind us…?  And that hippy with the curly hair hugging Dalek Om opposite the Doctor?  Yeah, that’s me.  I was hired as an extra body part, got paid with a couple bags of jelly babies and had more than enough time to roam freely and work on one of my novels and supposedly a lot of my healing. (Disclaimer note: Mani Navasothy is doing a superb job, and we are all more than happy to be doing this project with him even if it’s revenue-less for the time being.  We have a blast with him and even though I have previously said that this is the “holiday” part of my life, I do view it as a job in itself, and it just so happens that I am having about two or three heaps of fun with it, cos only one just does not cover it!) (And as for Mani, I am proud to have him as my Director, my Teacher and my Friend, so I will stop talking about anything film-wise from here on out of respect for him, but you’ll get the full deal in a few weeks time!).

Oh, but that means I cannot say much about my healing, either, cos it’s very linked to some of the places where the filming was made and the storyline… Eek… well, what I will say about it, is that I worked on a lot of stuff there.  A lot, a lot.  And even so, I’m still not quite healthy at this moment, cos I’ve got a cough that’s about to make my lungs come out my mouth…  and we all know what cough is, don’t we?  Resistance to make necessary changes in life; overwhelming feelings of worries, anxieties and stress… and being self-critical!  And when it comes directly from the throat: communication issues!! So then, if I worked out so much stuff in Glastonbury, why is it that I’m sick like this now?  Oh, the reasons, the many reasons!

Reason number one:  I’m a writer without a book to show for it.  Wait, what’s that?  I can’t hear you very well…  I do have a book?  No, I’m not forgetting what I’ve written, I just don’t have anything published yet…  Oh, I see… My Kindle book, you mean?  Books?  There’s two?  Then how come no one is reading them?  Yes, yes, I remember uploading the short story collection some time ago last week, but I haven’t announced it cos I have to change my bank details first, but more on that later…  Well, let me tell you this, most people who are reading this have already read my book as well, or at least bought it and been going thru it slowly, in case they’re using it to learn Spanish…  I have no problem with you lot, cos the support I’ve got from my readers so far was been very heartwarming; the problem is when I have to put myself out there so that I can actually start making money from it as well as the other ones which will be coming soon (you dear readers have been paying a little bit for my caffeine addiction, so yay and thank you, but I need to pay the rent as well, if you get my drift…?) (er, for that reason I have decided to go AdSense, and will have it on my other soon-to-come blogs, so I apologize to those of you who liked my blog clean-cut and free…  who knows, I might not even keep it…  Maybe I can make a living out of counseling, coaching, healing and organizing spaces… and then this will just have been a minor slip in my career… or I might not even go thru with it…)…  Anyhu, this means a whole lot when you’re given such a hard time at home because you stay in all day so that must mean you’re doing nothing and that must mean you should be doing the full clean-up of the house…  this coming from a person who tends to not be here for weeks on end, so has no idea that some days I am out all day, either with my writing, with lectures, or merely having heaps of fun running around London with my Sonic Screwdriver in my hand (whether we’re filming or not, lol).  But the problem is never just a single person, is it? 

Side note!  This morning she started screaming at our landlord thru our Home Whatsapp group, for no apparent reason, so yep, I know it’s not my problem, it’s hers, because she cannot quite deal with school stress as she put it in the thread, nor with having to balance two boyfriends…  Yes, so now not only is she an actress/singer/dancer/model who has no time to clean up the house and so asks the writer, who apparently stays in all day staring at the ceiling, to do so… but now she also has two boyfriends, when the writer has none.  My point is: it’s not my problem, and I have to let it go, cos there is no way that I can prove anything to her anyways, but also because she clearly has Drama Queen Disfunction… which, btw, cos I’ve heard her sing, I’m 100% sure she must be amazing at what she does, I was just expecting a bit of empathy, you know? Cos really, we artists thread the same path, she must have been where I am at some point in her life, right?  But this all just brings about:

Reason number two: when you actually have to tell people what you do for a living so that they can even consider renting you a room in their house, things get difficult…  See, this house I’m living in has been sold, which means that even everybody has to look for a new place.  Thing is, since the original plan was for me to go back to Mexico, apply for the visa, come back and do the training course and then set up my business, hooray, I was not even a little bit worried…  but it turned out to be a misunderstanding, because the woman that sent me the information said that I didn’t have to do the training course until after I had got the visa, when in fact the course is a major factor in getting the visa… if it hadn’t occurred to me to call her last week I might have never got the correct method of doing things, and all because I had that nagging feeling that I’d read it the other way around in the guidelines a few months ago…  turns out I was right, but apparently I wasn’t too clear on my question for her, either, cos she didn’t know I was flying back to apply now!  She’d understood that I’d go back, set up shop there for a year and then come back in the summer, do the training course, fly back to Mexico, apply for the visa, then come back and settle here again…  Anybody still with me?  Miscommunication issues… they can be brutal, I tell you… Well, because I called her last week, I got it sorted out, so I got the invitation to apply for the training course this October, cos the way she sees it, I’m already in the country anyway, with permit to remain until December, and I have gone so far with my business planning that I’m already crossing over to a further stage, one that people normally cross into *after* the training.  So, yeah, that’s how hard I’m working, even though I’ve got nothing physical to show for it.  Problem is, when I go house hunting and people ask me what I do for a living, I am having difficulty to stop myself from skidding. It was fine three months ago, when I was coming in to “do research for my novel over the summer”, but now it got complicated, cos I’ve also got the question “Well, didn’t they give you advance notice that you had to leave the house by a certain date?” (so I will stop saying that the house is being sold, I guess…  but then how do I answer the whole “Why are you leaving that house?” matter?).  These questions come forth because I’m basically trying to rent a room for less than three months, and people get a bit antsy with that, especially with the whole thing of, yeah, I’m a tourist and not earning anything… trust me, doesn´t matter how innocent my eyes look or how sweet my voice is, most people just do not like the fact that a potential illegal immigrant might be renting a room in their place… which is ironic, since 4 of the 5 people that I’ve seen are immigrants themselves, but that is not the point at all.  The point is that people want to feel safe in their homes, and having a potential illegal immigrant artist/hippy healer in a room in their house might not be the safest of bets…

Another side note: remember that I am living in a city that requires proof of address now for even the smallest of things, such as getting your money back for the three Oyster cards that you used last summer when you were a student and your parents came to visit… so, once again, nothing physical to prove I am even me!  Geez!

Now, I feel “the fear” because I crossed a borderline that I had no intention of crossing yet.  My original plan was to keep working until I could make my writings take flight, but as there was no success on the getting-a-job-after-graduation thing, now I’m swerving into self-employment.  It is the right thing to do in many ways, especially because I do have many skills that other jobs require but I don’t have the work-experience for, and also because I have really become an independent doer (hopefully soon an independent payer as well, yay!), so it makes a good life-style to manage your own schedule and other things… but when you have to explain that to people who you want to rent a room from, it gets weird, lol…  especially in a super-expensive country like this!  And when you’re 32 and living off your parents’ money, it just stops being funny, if it ever was… I struck a student loan kind of deal with them, so I’m at peace with it, but most people just hear, Yeah, parents’ money…

See, for me the easiest thing here would be to go back to not caring what people think of me, which is mostly a lot easier when you’re a student writing your first novel during class breaks and have purple hair, or when you’re a part-time teacher and are still writing that first novel, or when you’re a student again and everyone is more or less on the same page (and you’re writing a brand new novel, hooray!), but when you get to reason number 3, that’s when things fall apart a bit.  R3 for me is that feeling that everybody is going faster than me and that no matter how fast I run I am not even close to caching up with anyone…  Everybody else has jobs, houses, money coming in, are getting married (or are at least dating, which for me would be an enormous leap forward), and are even forming families.  And there are moments in my life, in my week, when I could not feel any lonelier, because I know that even if I’d wanted to be with someone, it doesn’t matter if they’re in the same city as me or not: everyone has their own full-life type of deal, and even though everyone says that I am quite the busy woman (which I am), I am certainly not the one to break appointments, I am not the one to keep saying “Yes, let’s meet such and such day” and then not even call to cancel so I could make other plans with other people that I am also hoping to see…  I mean, I do say it a lot: I am a writer so I have a very flexible schedule, but a) that does not mean I’m free 100% of the time, it just means “flexible schedule”, and b) not everyone else has a flexible schedule, so when someone leaves me hanging, I’m basically left alone for a Friday night or a Saturday night, when everyone else is out there, doing their own thing, with their partners or party friends and there is no space for me in there (I mean, if I wasn’t invited from the beginning what makes me think that I could self-invite, right? Everyone knows that I’m not a party person anyway, so who’d want to say “Come over if you don’t have any plans”.).  But it’s an all week kind of thing: lunch, dinner, coffee, you name it, people just go “Oh, you don’t mind, do you?”.  Truly not asking for pity here, just for empathy, cos it’s a truth that has to be said, and it just so happens that it is a returning conflict I have in Mexico, which makes me say even more Heck I want to stay here!  (It’s also happened here but like three times?)  Last time I left I even got a few of those people telling me that I had not paid enough attention to them and that they barely even saw me.  Excuse me? I called your cell, I texted, facebooked and whatsapped, what more do you want?  And now, I am putting my whole life out there, for all to see, on a daily basis, telling the world my news and trying to make myself be heard as a writer and the same people ask every once in a while: “Why are you forgetting me?  I haven’t heard any news from you in forever!”  That is, they get back to me only when I tag them in something or send a pm or whatever, and sometimes I instantly regret it because they answer back “What a miracle that you’re calling!”  Huh, but you haven’t called/written to me either, so is it a miracle that you’re answering, then?

Ohh ranty-panty today are we?  Well, I am 100% sure that I am offending none of you who are reading this, because as far I know, you are those who have been truly supportive of me during this time, and I obviously got an amazing network of people all over the world and those people make me feel warm and cozy even though I might be lonely at times…  Most probably it’s because of you guys that I’ve actually come this far, and I can feel some of you turn back and pull me a bit (no one pushes me, cos believe me, I’m so so far behind…  but I feel a pull now and then, and that is what I need to keep going).

Aaaaand, if you’re a passer by coming in to read this, I must say, thank you for your time and thank you for your consideration…  Welcome to my head and I hope you stay.  I need to get myself some readers from outside of my inner circle, and that might take me a while, but if you’re one of them and are deciding to stay, thank you again and I will try to make it worth your while (maybe we’ll heal together, maybe I’ll just entertain you…  whichever way, I’m glad you’re here).

So, I got lost a bit with R3, but the gist of it is, how can I not care what people think of me, if that’s what my living arrangements, my possible future love life, my client base when I set up my business, and my reader numbers will AND are depending upon?  And just the fact that there are people far ahead of me even in North Carolina does nothing to help my nerves.  Yes, there is a reason to that sentence; I did not just overdose on Strepsils.  Thing is, I’ve been goin’ around tellin’ people I’m the first ever Lady Doctor, when there’s in fact another one, and she’s ginger too!  Whether who’s better than who is not the point (because there are tastes for all, so I worry not about that part), but rather that even when I feel I can finally say I’m doing something out of the ordinary, something out of true love for art, there is another one who’s already shown up and done that.  Story of everybody’s life’s you’ll say (heck I’m saying it to myself just now), but when you add that to the already huge pile of things I have to prove about myself, you’ve got a red-hot reason number 4 right there (pun partially intended).  And there are a few more, but I’ll just leave it here, cos I might zig-zag around these subjects for a few weeks anyway, at least until I can go Bling blig, shiny happy healing has arrived!, or until I find out how to really set up the healing blog and then let’s see if I move all of these incessant ramblings into there to be worked out in a fuller, more professional way…  and also, this links a lot into the Glastonbury entry I’ll set up in a few weeks, so there might be a bit of a déjà vu going around by then, lol… either way, I’ll stop now at R4 and see what other answers the Universe brings about :)

So, damn right I’m coughing, damn right I’m crying and damn right I’m scared out of my sixth sense (yep, even though every message that has reached me over the past year has been “trust yourself, what you believe to be true is actually true” and so on, this situation makes me weak at the knees, and not in the nice, warm I-just-saw-a-pretty-boy kind of way, but in the holly-crap-on-a cracker-I-can-barely-stand-I-am-so-weak-kind of way…), but that doesn’t mean I’m frozen, it just means that I’ll find a way to let it go and get the healing down right this time!

10 points for whoever got that one… oh, it was too easy, then?  That’s fine, I’m leavin’ it cos I like it!

Cheers world, and may the healing reach you whenever you need it too!